Tag Archives: Redesigning Education

Serendipity drawns me back into the frames discussion, this time through Jon Kolko’s Magic of Design series on the Fast Company Design Blog. This post also relates to an assertion that the arts are integral to the 21 Century economy. Most people’s everyday work lives operate in something close to a scientific orientation, but we still need access to a more biased and creative orientation. Integrating the arts into our social workspaces give us inspiration to add design thinking to this workspace and the process is explained through Jon Kolko’s Magic of Design.

I’ve previously discussed Jon’s first 2 posts on a process for innovation and providing work space to explore deviant ideas. His last post in this series is about the importance of bringing frames, perspectives and biases to the design process. The statement: “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time” is attributed to F Scott Fitzgerald. To participate in design processes, the trick is to bring both diversity and this type of intelligence to your processes. In this case, we can not ignore science as a way of driving our actions, but we also need creative innovation, and in some ways science and innovation are at opposing ends of a spectrum. Sometimes we need to embrace our biases. As Jon explains it:

For as a designer stands in front of a whiteboard in a war-room, surrounded by anecdotes, quotes, pictures, sketches, and working models — and searching for a new, innovative, and persuasive idea — she is relying on her ability to connect something in her own life with something in the data she’s gathered. She is purposefully applying a frame of bias to objective, empirical data, in order to produce something new.

This is called sensemaking. . . . the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.” . . . all of this (design activity) is useless if the people doing the synthesis aren’t very interesting. Synthesis requires a team of varied and highly eclectic designers who are empowered to embrace their biased perspectives. . . . Groundbreaking design doesn’t come through statistical regression testing, metrics, and causality. It comes from the richness of a biased perspective on the world.

Here is the primary Issue: How do we hold the multiple perspective as important and shift between them on an everyday bases? There is no place where this is more important than in education. What kind of Environment can help us to function better in this way?

Their main point

Companies offshore production to cut wages, gain access to skills and capabilities and seek new markets, but they fail to gain more than a small affluent segment of these emerging markets because they do not seek the level of innovations to target the demands of the larger low-wage market. Long-term they then are often undercut by the local companies that do seek this level of innovation.

What do the authors recommend:

Develop open collaborative environments and orchestrate innovation within these partnership networks.

It is not enough to strip costs from existing products. Instead, redesign products and processes from a “Clean-sheet” perspective in a way that amplifies your own distinctive capabilities and those of the partners in your network.

Relevance for Education

Whether it’s high school dropouts, workers needing re-training, organizations with new learning demands, higher expectations from graduates, or a multitude of other new demands for learning; we too are facing new and different “markets” for learning. It is not enough just to make small adjustments to existing systems that were designed for other demands. We need to redesign our educational products and processes by innovating within our own capabilities and by seeking open network partnerships to extend those capabiities.